Recent years have seen strong growth in the use of action and adventure cameras. Many people now have ready access to portable cameras that can be attached to people, vehicles, buildings, and even to animals. At the same time more Internet traffic is focused on viewing videos. Many of these videos are produced with small portable action cameras, but even professional quality video cameras are becoming more affordable and more common in use.
When a camera is attached to a moving object, the viewer will see the movement in the captured video. This works well if the moving object moves smoothly and changes speed gradually. However, a vehicle moving across a road, a trail, or the sea will hit bumps. A runner will move up and down with each step. Most moving objects move in ways that are distracting or unpleasant for the viewer of the video.
For most video capture scenarios, the video camera must be stabilized in order for the video to be pleasing to watch and easy to follow. This is especially true for action cameras mounted to a bicycle, skateboard, or other vehicle and for wearable cameras. Typically cameras have been stabilized using expensive heavy mechanical stabilizers that hold the camera in a fixed position as the stabilizer is moved by a vehicle or other carrier. Mechanical camera stabilizers are very effective and are ubiquitous in high end video production.
More recently optical image stabilization (OIS) moves one or more optical elements in the camera lens to counter physical movements of the camera. This requires a more expensive lens system, an inertial references system in the camera, and an actuator to receive detected movement and move some of the optical elements very quickly.
Electronic image stabilization (EIS) analyzes the images and detects motion between frames. This requires extra boundary pixel regions around the image so that the center of the image can be shifted in any direction to compensate for camera motion. If there are no available pixels outside of the image, then edges of the image are estimated by interpolation or some other technique. EIS is limited by the feature tracking algorithm and the clarity of features in the video. A video in which all the features are moving may not successfully be de-jittered. Another electronic post-processing approach is to use gyroscope or accelerometer information from the camera and then move the center of the video frames in response. These post-processing techniques require some time and some processing power to realize.